* Nice Shoes speeds image transfers over WANs
The total transfer time of digital images from post-production facility Nice Shoes is 12 times faster than before. Nice Shoes’ head of new media services John DiMaggio credits the speed increase not to the extra bandwidth the company invested in, but rather to Orbital Data’s Orbital 5500 appliance.
Nice Shoes, of New York, provides post-production services for high-end television commercials for such clients as Coke, Sony and IBM, as well as encoding and other services for clients worldwide. That means they send a lot of digital information and images over WAN links and the public Internet.
“If you are just sending a few minutes of DVD-quality footage, you can count on it arriving fast and reliably,” DiMaggio says. “But with longer running times and higher resolution files, the transfer times can be slow and unpredictable, even when network bandwidth is high.”
The appliance is placed on either side of a WAN connection and uses network monitoring and flow-control algorithms to maintain the desired connection speed, regardless of latency and retransmit rates. Orbital 5500 is managed via a Web interface on each device. The company says it “works by having a better sense of how data is flowing through the network.” Orbital Data uses a set of parameters to get a sense of how the network is operating.
For DiMaggio, the need to have an appliance at either end of the WAN connection limits his ability to send large files to customer or partner sites, unless they also sign on with Orbital Data. Otherwise, he says the appliance helps him reduce transfer speeds. In one example, between New York and Cape Town, South Africa, Nice Shoes was able to increase the transfer speed from 300K bit/sec to about 3.5M bit/sec.
“We were paying a premium for bandwidth, about $2,000 per month, so Orbital pays for itself,” he says. Orbital 5500 pricing ranges from $12,000 for T-1 throughput to $50,000 for 200M bit/sec throughput.
